Eric Schmidt: Android Could Make Us $10 Billion A Year

Tweet

We know that several Wall Street investors have voiced concerns about Google’s “pet projects” including Android. Some of the Gordon Gekko types don’t see how a free product like Android (among others) could end up making money for the company. Google faced some criticism in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, but now Google CEO Eric Schmidt has defended Android, saying it could end up making Google $10 billion a year in revenue.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt said that Android “can be a powerful business, a 10-plus billion-dollar business.” He then went on to ask the ‘Journal, “If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that?” While Android doesn’t have 1 billion users yet, it is growing rapidly to the tune of 160,000 new handsets activated daily, according to Google.

Schmidt said rhetorically, if they had 1 billion users, they would only have to monetize $10 per user. In addition to their usual search ads, Schmidt said they could possibly charge Android users a subscription fee for access to premium digital content, like newspapers. The WSJ was obviously impressed with that. Their writer Amir Efrati writing in the article, “A billion people paying for newspaper content? Sounds good to us.”

Honestly, Google must be spending considerably capital on engineering Android – but we doubt that a paid news feed on Android will attract enough users to pay for the product.

What do you think? Would you pay $10 a year for some extra content on Android? Sound off in the comments.